The links between trade, disease and economic warfare

ANYONE who has travelled through an airport has surely noticed the rather long list of items that are prohibited on board a plane. But along with the more understandably forbidden articles, such as guns, knives, grenades and canisters of petrol, there is often a list of seemingly innocuous cargo&colon; fresh foodstuffs. In Australia, even muddy shoes are frowned upon. It may seem a bit excessive, but these prohibitions are the climax of a long historical trend and are motivated, as Mark Harrison reveals in Contagion, by a mixture of public-health, food-safety and protectionist trading policies.